E-Scooter Parking in Santa Monica

Santa Monica is corralling e-Scooter parking by creating corralled parking areas. The city has deployed shared mobility drop zones for dockless scooters and bikes. Riders can park their scooters and bikes in 19 off-street parking zones. The scooters are place there in the morning, but riders are still leaving e-scooters on the sidewalks. Santa Monica has impounded 35 scooters, written almost 700 traffic and administrative citations, and recorded 16 collisions.

The program requires companies to educate riders about safety, make helmets more widely available, share data with the City and respond to user and resident complaints. It also stipulates that ADA paths, entrances, driveways, bus stops and lanes must be clear, and prohibits companies from distributing vehicles to beach lots, Ocean Front Walk, the Santa Monica Pier, the Third Street Promenade and Palisades Park.

PG&E Proposes New Rates for EV Charging

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) submitted a proposal to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to establish new commercial electric vehicle (EV) charging rates to help drive more rapid customer adoption.

PG&E’s proposal will make EV charging simpler and more affordable for fleet vehicles and charging stations at apartment buildings, workplaces and other public locations in Central and Northern California. Combining the new rate with PG&E’s efforts to accelerate EV adoption will drive progress toward California’s shared climate goals and result in cleaner air for all.

Under the existing rate structure, high-power public EV chargers that are on business electric rates can incur demand charges, a cost included on commercial customer bills that are calculated based on the peak electricity usage of a customer during a billing period. Planning around and managing these demand charges pose unique and significant challenges to EV charging projects.

FAM65xxxx modules address a rapidly growing market as the number of EV and PHEV vehicle designs and production volumes increase. They can save approximately 50% board space and significantly ease manufacturability versus discrete component based solutions. Their small size and weight combined with high efficiency levels can dramatically improve power density and system efficiency, contributing to reduced fuel consumption and CO2 emissions for vehicles.

ON Semiconductor’s new IPMs also offer improved reliability versus discrete solutions and other power modules, due to optimized content and internal layout resulting in excellent thermal performance. Moreover, lower electromagnetic interference (EMI) has been reached due to an integrated high voltage capacitor. The devices have an internal direct bonded copper (DBC) structure that is fully isolated to 5 kilovolts AC / second, making them easier to use by alleviating the need for insulation sheets associated with discrete solutions. Safety and reliability is further underlined with compliance to the latest, most stringent automotive qualifications – AECQ 101 and AQG324.

ON Semiconductor , announces an Official Supplier relationship with Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport and Mercedes EQ Formula E team that will extend their automotive power solutions leadership onto the highly competitive world stages of Formula One and Formula E. Building on the company’s technology, already utilized in the energy recovery pack that controls ignition and injection drivers of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport race car, which has won four consecutive Formula One World Constructors’ championships and five consecutive Drivers’ titles, ON Semiconductor will collaborate with the Mercedes EQ Formula E Team in developing next-generation electric powertrain innovations for cutting-edge performance and efficiency.//

HyreCar for Hire in All 50 States

HyreCar Inc., the carsharing marketplace for ridesharing, today announced the Company has expanded access to its proprietary platform for drivers and vehicle owners in all 50 U.S. states.

Renesas Electronics New MOSFET Drivers

Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE:6723), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, announced a new family of automotive-grade 100V, 4A half-bridge N-channel MOSFET drivers. The ISL784x4 family features three devices: the ISL78424 and ISL78444 with single tri-level PWM input for controlling both gate drivers, and the ISL78434, which has dual independent inputs that separately control the high-side and low-side drivers. The ISL784x4 half-bridge N-MOSFET drivers complement the ISL78224 4-phase bidirectional controller, enabling it to provide up to 3kW of power and greater than 95 percent efficiency in 12V-48V converters used in mild hybrid vehicles. The ISL784x4 drivers are also well suited for 12V-24V bidirectional DC/DC converters, as well as other high current buck or boost applications.

he ISL784x4 drivers are a great fit in high current DC/DC applications like the 12-48V converter for 48V mild hybrids. They improve efficiency by delivering robust gate drive with 3A peak sourcing current and 4A peak sinking current. Strong gate drive allows them to rapidly switch high current MOSFETs with large gate capacitance, which reduces switching losses. The half-bridge MOSFET drivers’ adaptive dead time control minimizes excess dead time to reduce conduction losses and further increase DC/DC conversion efficiency. In addition, the ISL784x4 drivers offer voltage ratings that are ideal for 48V automotive systems with the switching node tolerating 70V DC and up to 86V for infrequent transients. Similarly, the high-side driver’s bootstrap node can tolerate 86V DC and up to 100V during transients.

GUI CAR Tool

Renesas Electronics Corporation, a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, is announcing the release of the GUI CAR (Customizable Analysis Report) Tool, an innovative safety analysis tool that will enhance customers’ ability to quickly integrate Renesas products into their safety-critical automotive systems while increasing user confidence in system compliance to the latest safety standard. The powerful new FMEDA (failure mode effects and diagnostics analysis) tool is optimized for the ISO 26262 standard, which addresses safety of electrical and/or electronic systems within road vehicles, and is the target for compliance of this revolutionary product.

The CAR Tool unifies key aspects of the safety analysis by offering a multi-layered view of the safety-related component, complete with customizable analysis parameters and all of the results required by ISO 26262, such as single point fault metric (SPFM) and latent fault metric (LFM). This innovative tool also provides the user with estimations for both probabilistic metric for random hardware failures (PMHF) and its evaluation of each cause of safety goal violation. These results can be displayed from the entire component down to each single element via different hierarchical levels, accurately splitting its FIT in the appropriate fault class (single-point, residual, latent, etc.) This also makes it easy and effective to browse complex system-on-chip (SoC)/microcontroller (MCU) safety analyses.

Wind River Sync Enhanced

Wind River, a leader in delivering IoT software for safety-critical domains including automotive, announced enhancements to Wind River Edge Sync, including differential system technology that enables the smallest differential update when conducting over-the-air (OTA) updates. The ability to keep updates minimal reduces distribution time and cost, update transmission time, and memory required on automotive electronic control units (ECUs). Wind River’s latest Edge Sync technology has been supplied to major automakers, most recently for Ford.

Edge Sync is Wind River’s highly modular, end-to-end OTA update and software lifecycle management solution that allows for rapid, safe, and secure updates to software and firmware. Edge Sync meshes seamlessly with automakers’ proprietary systems or with third party data solutions enabling car companies to efficiently manage and maintain automotive software for the entire life of the car and to continuously improve the value of the car and experiences with customers on a long term basis.

Efficient differential updates are an important functionality necessary for a successful, production-grade automotive OTA solution. The management of software over the course of a vehicle’s lifetime has become increasingly important to both maintaining system value and as a means of addressing security, and OTA update technology is a key element of this.

Alliance Ventures Invests in Transit

Alliance Ventures, the strategic venture capital arm of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, has announced that it has invested in the latest round of funding in Transit, a multi-modal transportation mobile app company based in Montreal, Canada. This marks the latest technology investment by Alliance Ventures, launched earlier this year to support start-ups, early-stage development and entrepreneurs at the cutting edge of next-generation systems for the automotive industry.

Optimus Ride Integrates NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Xavier

Optimus Ride, a leading self-driving vehicle technology company, announced it is integrating the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Xavier computing platform into its autonomous vehicle fleet. Capable of delivering 30 trillion operations per second utilizing new deep learning and computer vision accelerators, the NVIDIA DRIVE platform will deliver unprecedented computational performance and safety to Optimus Ride’s self-driving vehicles.

With the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Xavier platform, Optimus Ride can:

Build its first fully driverless (Level 4) fleet service for geofenced deployments

Scale vehicle intelligence to deploy globally in the AV marketplace.

HARMAN ISO 26262 Cert

HARMAN International, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., focused on connected technologies for automotive, consumer and enterprise markets, announced that the company has been ISO 26262 certified. This certification is the international standard that governs functional safety in the automotive industry commissioned by TüV SüD, Product Service GmbH – an independent, internationally accredited certification company.

Compliance to ISO 26262 is critical for the safety of connected vehicles and addresses the possible hazards caused by malfunctioned behavior of electrical and/or electronic (E/E) safety related systems and their interactions. As a recognized leader of safety and security in connected vehicles, this certification further validates HARMAN’s emphasis on safety at the forefront of innovation throughout the entire automotive technology lifecycle.

Under this certification, TüV SüD, Product Service GmbH, endorses the established software development processes within HARMAN for development up to ASIL D. This classification is used to specify the item’s or element’s necessary requirements of ISO 26262 and safety measures to apply for avoiding an unreasonable risk, with ‘D’ representing the most stringent and ‘A’ the least stringent level. This achievement acknowledges HARMAN’s exceptional dedication toward ensuring high system reliability within its software technology to improve the overall safety of passengers in connected vehicles.

TomTom Nav for BMW Motorrrad

TomTom announced that BMW Motorrad owners can now experience the best of TomTom navigation for motorcyclists running on the BMW Motorrad Connected app. The smartphone app stays safely in the rider’s pocket, while visual directions are shown on the bike’s integrated handlebar display. Audio directions are provided via Bluetooth® into the rider’s compatible helmet.

Greenlot Charging for Volvo Trucks

Greenlots, a global provider of EV (electric vehicle) charging software and solutions, today announced it will collaborate with Volvo Trucks, one of the largest heavy-duty truck companies in the world, to deploy charging infrastructure for electric trucks operating out of warehouses in Southern California. This is the first heavy-duty fleet-charging project stemming from a significant public-private partnership with the California Air Resources Board (CARB). CARB awarded $44.8 million to the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) for Volvo’s Low Impact Green Heavy Transport Solutions (LIGHTS) project. As part of this groundbreaking project, Greenlots will outfit warehouses with heavy- and light-duty charging infrastructure, integrate the chargers with onsite solar PV and energy storage systems and leverage Greenlots’ charging network management software to deploy Volvo’s first electrified trucks in North America.

All of the charging equipment for the project – including both Level 2 chargers and 150kW DC fast-chargers – will operate on Greenlots’ SKY™ enterprise software platform to enable seamless management of Volvo’s fleet, charging stations and energy storage systems. Volvo Trucks’ connectivity system will also be integrated to provide truck operators with a comprehensive view of their vehicles’ operational and charging readiness.

Sonim & eBrake Fleet Solution

Sonim Technologies, maker of the world’s toughest cell phones, and eBrake, an innovative new distracted driving solution for smartphones and tablets, announced a cutting-edge partnership to eliminate distracted driving in fleet industries including public transit, school buses, utilities, oil and gas, construction, and more.

The partnership will result in eBrake embedded on select Sonim devices including the new XP8, an industrial- and military-grade device built to work in extreme conditions and environments while integrating functionality critical for industrial workers. Fleets that deploy the XP8 and other Sonim devices will be able to protect their drivers and reduce liability risk from distracted driving crashes, simply by ‘arming’ eBrake.

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